Jane Rule

Possibly Jane Rule's best known novel, The Desert of the Heart is the story of a free spirited woman falling for a repressed older woman. Evelyn Hall is taking respite at a ranch for women as she seeks a divorce after years of marriage. Written in 1964, it serves as a fascinating snapshot into the lives and regulations of women seeking their freedom. Dr. Hall stays at a Nevada ranch where she meets, and falls for, Ann Child ("Evelyn looked at Ann, the child she had always wanted, the friend she once had, the lover she never considered..."). Evelyn Hall has a hard time fitting in, and Jane Rule cleverly captures the feeling of a fish out of water time after time. "Whenever there were generalizations about women, Evelyn weighed herself against them and found herself insubstantial," writes Rule, capturing the alienation Evelyn has even from her own gender. Rule walk many thin lines in the book, whether it's about ownership, freedom, convention or eroticism. "Ann turned, the longing of her body straining against the last reluctance of her mind, and she felt Evelyn's tentative, almost causal beginning gradually give way to an authority of love." Remember that this was written in 1964. Desert of the Heart stands as a tour de force in lesbian culture, still as warm and richly engaging today as it was when it was first written.

Rappaccini's daughter / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- [The black cat]( / Edgar Allan Poe -- [Bartleby, the scrivener]( / Herman Melville -- [The story of an hour]( / Kate Chopin -- An outpost of progress / Joseph Conrad -- The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- The open boat / Stephen Crane -- [Araby]( / James Joyce -- The horse dealer's daughter / D.H. Lawrence -- Bliss / Katherine Mansfield -- Rope / Katherine Anne Porter -- [A rose for Emily]( / William Faulkner -- A clean, well-lighted place / Ernest Hemingway -- The lamp at noon / Sinclair Ross -- Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty -- My heart is broken / Mavis Gallant -- The loons / Margaret Laurence -- Dulse / Alice Munro -- Inland passage / Jane Rule -- A & P / John Updike -- Fogbound in Avalon / Elizabeth McGrath -- The conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth -- The motor car / Austin C. Clarke -- The concert stages of Europe / Jack Hodgins -- The resplendent quetzal / Margaret Atwood -- The tenant / Bharati Mukherjee -- Borders / Thomas King -- Everyday use / Alice Walker -- The naked man / Greg Hollingshead -- Cages / Guy Vanderhaeghe -- Two kinds / Amy Tan.

AGAINST THE SEASON is a consciously old-fashioned, stylicized [sic] novel about cycles of birth, growth, and death ... An old woman comes to terms with her dead sister while reading her diaries, her pregnant housekeeper teaches her shy grandnephew a little courage; a middle-aged couple yearn to overcome loneliness, an elderly couple court in the face of public ridicule, and Dina Pyros, used furniture dealer and town butch, is courted, public and privately, by Rosemary Hopwood, social worker, nervous, aristocractic and very determined.

For forty years David Crown has kept his twin sister Diana a secret. Until his wife's death, not even his children--Diana's nieces and nephews--have known about Diana and her lifetime companion Constance. But now David seeks to bridge over those years and recapture the closeness of childhood, to become part of Diana's life, to have her be a major part of his. For the independent, irascible Diana, the overtures from her brother are an unwelcome intrusion. Retired from her medical practice, she spends her days fully occupied with Constance, for whom memory is increasingly a sometime thing. David, growing ever more fond of the enchanting Constance, struggles to win her trust... And Diana is inexorably drawn into the event and drama of David's family life.

Tells the story of a young woman in the late 1950s and early 1960s as she negotiates her lesbian sexuality. Vividly depicts New York, London and a group of friends as they search for love in a time of strict societal constraints.

"How does sexuality evolve among lesbians and gay men? What is the underlying nature of homosexual attitutdes toward aging? Is censorship ever appropriate? Homosexuals telling their parents--when and how? Jane Rule's frank opinions on these issues and many other realities and fallacies of homosexual life..."--Publisher's description.

Jane Rule tells the story of her first twenty-one years of life. The manuscript was discovered in her papers in 2008, a year after her death.

Told as a series of interconnected stories, Jane Rule's fifth novel takes us to a place where feminism, creativity, and sexual politics collide. Contract with the World follows a group of friends, artists, and lovers as they negotiate the shifting terrain of the 1970s, a time when gay and lesbian politics were just emerging. Divided into six parts, the novel enters a world marked by desire, ambition, jealousy, and love. We follow these sexually adventurous thirty-something friends as they marry, divorce, take lovers, lose love, and never stop searching for personal and artistic fulfillment. Whether gay, straight, or bisexual, Rule's characters are as much a product of the era that defines them as of the wise and foolhardy choices they make in their own turbulent lives - choices that will have inevitable, sometimes tragic consequences.

Contains: Before dark (1893) / by Marcel Proust ; translated by Richard Howard -- Mabel Neathe (1903) / by Gertrude Stein -- Prologue to Women in love (1921) / by D.H. Lawrence -- Miss Ogilvy finds herself (1926) / by Radclyffe Hall -- Arthur Snatchfold (1928) / by E.M. Forster -- Divorce in Naples (1931) / by William Faulkner -- Just boys (1931-1934) / by James T. Farrell -- The knife of the times (1932) / by William Carlos Williams -- The sea change / by Ernest Hemingway -- Momma (1947) / by John Horne Burns -- Pages from Cold Point (1950) / by Paul Bowles -- Letters and life (1952) / by Christopher Isherwood -- My brother writes poetry for an Englishman (1953) / by Marris Murray -- Two on a party (1954) / by Tennessee Williams -- You may safely gaze (1956) / by James Purdy -- Pages from an abandoned journal (1956) / by Gore Vidal -- Johnnie (1958) / by Joan O'Donovan -- The threesome (1961) / by Helen Essary Ansell -- A step towards Gomorrah (1961) / by Ingeborg Bachmann ; translated by Michael Bullock -- Jurge Dulrumple (1962) / by John O'Hara -- The wreck (1962) / by Maude Hutchins -- The beautiful room is empty (1966) / by Edmund White -- Chagrin in three parts (1967) / by Graham Greene -- Miss A. and Miss M. (1972) / by Elizabeth Taylor -- Burning th bed (1973) / by Doris Betts -- Middle children (1975) / by Jane Rule.

Internationally acclaimed author of seven novels, prolific short story writer and social commentator, Jane Rule compiled this final book of essays in the months before she died in late 2007. As in her fiction and three previously published essay collections, we find here an absorbing story-teller, a wise observer of character and a fearless spokesperson for lesbian and gay rights. In some of the essays Rule considers episodes of her own life, from infancy almost to its end. She intersperses thoughtful commentary on political themes that have long engaged her, such as censorship, pornography, misguided tax laws and same-sex marriage, and on literary issues such as the nature of story-telling and the role of the woman writer. There is both laughter and grief in these essays, barely-contained anger at injustice, and a clear-eyed acceptance of what can't be changed.